How Untitled Ad Lab founder Mike Gallagher powered up after getting laid off

It hasn’t been an easy go lately in B.C.’s video game industry, as anyone with access to Google can tell you. The amount of layoffs and restructurings and outright shutdowns in the sector have been hard to stomach.

But Mike Gallagher is proving that, with some entrepreneurial gusto and a little luck, it’s possible for businesses to succeed in the industry.

When Gallagher was laid off from his director of marketing position at Vancouver’s Hothead Games after the company underwent a restructuring of sorts, he held firm in his belief that he had more to give the industry. So the veteran of video game marketing, who had previously worked for studios like Electronic Arts and Hyper Hippo, started Untitled Ad Lab to help independent, small- and medium-sized game studios with their marketing and advertising efforts.

The connections that Gallagher had made in his previous roles came in handy in his new endeavour, as did his experience. The luck part? That came in the form of funding this summer from both the Canadian Media Fund and Creative BC that’s intended to help video game companies grow. Local companies can use a certain percentage of those funds on marketing.

“We found a big opportunity in helping these game studios build marketing, secure funding and bring games to market,” says Gallagher, who has grown Untitled to seven employees in just under a year. “Half of the projects we’ve gotten are local Canadian businesses that need help. They had to lay people off from COVID or VC funding tapped out. For us, it’s a chance to help other Canadian businesses grow while growing internally as well.”

Untitled has worked with over a dozen studios on their games, including Vancouver-based Night Market Games, which was called Epic Story Interactive before Untitled aided its rebrand.

“Our big tent pole offering is community and player engagement,” explains Gallagher. “We don’t look at it just like, ‘We’re going to run your social media.’ We talk about it from the beginning of the game’s inception and come in at every player touchpoint along the journey, all the way to the end of a game’s lifecycle, always trying to optimize player engagement and keep them engaged in a more meaningful way.”

Untitled throws in creatively targeted ads (since you can’t outright target demographics via social media anymore), as well as influencers on top of the fan engagement piece to round out its strategy. “You used to, with Facebook advertising, be able to say, ‘I want to go after doctors who fish on the ocean.’ And you would get an audience of doctors who like to go sportfishing in Hawaii and target them directly. You can’t do that anymore, you have to go, ‘I’m going to target people in this age and income bracket who live on the coast.’ And your creative is somebody in doctor regalia reeling something in.”

Gallagher isn’t sure whether the results of the recent provincial election or next year’s federal election will affect the funding that these studios are receiving or will get in the future, but he thinks it would be a serious blow to the sector if that funding were to disappear.

“If they took it away it could devastate the industry in Canada, because VC funds are so locked up,” he says. “We could lose this resurgence we’re starting to see post-COVID in digital entertainment and digital industries.”